Tom Ricks Says Fox Is 'Making Up' His Apology for Slamming Fox on Fox

The Foreign Policy blogger now says Fox News is "making it up" when it claims he apologized for going on the network live and saying its coverage of Benghazi was hyped because it was operating as a wing of the GOP.

Award-winning Foreign Policy blogger/reporter Tom Ricks says Fox News is "making it up" when it claims he apologized for going on the network live and saying its coverage of Benghazi was hyped because it was operating as a wing of the GOP. Ricks gave Politico's Mackenzie Weinger the email he sent Fox News vice president Michael Clemente — who claimed Ricks apologized — and thus essentially provided a timeline of events. We now shall exhaustively break out that timeline.

Monday, 11:15a.m.: Ricks goes on Fox and says Fox is full of it.

11:16:30a.m.: Anchor ends the interview after about 1.5 minutes.

Moments later: Ricks runs into Fox reporter Brett Baier. "He asked if I was serious in saying that Fox had hyped Bengahzi, and I said I was," Ricks said in his email to Clemente. "We discussed that. It was a cordial exchange."

And then: "Later, as I was leaving, the booker or producer (I am not sure what her title was) said she thought I had been rude," Ricks writes. "I said I might have been a bit snappish because I am tired of book tour. This was in no way an apology but rather an explanation of why I jumped a bit when the anchor began the segment with the assertion that pressure on the White House was building—which it most clearly was not."

We will flesh out this tick-tock once we hear more on exactly how the non-apology/apology confusion got started. As for Ricks's on-air accusations themselves, they somehow have not been the subject of the same level of controversy, though are worth watching again in their entirety:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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